Digital Permaculture with Dominik Jais

Dominik Jais 
is a multi‑disciplinary artist and author whose work lies at the crossroads of sustainability, technology, and design. He holds a technically oriented education, which would explain his affinity for computer hardware and old parts as raw material for his art.

His artistic practice is concerned with reflecting on humanism, environments, and our human habitat; how we live; what we build; what we discard. Aiming to challenge spectators, to cause them to reconsider topics like environmental pollution, nature, the consequences of technological waste, as well as more abstract questions about perception, belonging, and trust.

A key principle for him is that art should not create more waste, it should contribute to reducing it. He uses upcycling heavily in his practice, where he takes end‑of‑life materials and transforming them into artworks. He also works in interactive art, combining sensors, motors, microcontrollers, etc., so the audience becomes part of the piece.

His best‑known written work is a book called Digital Permaculture

Digital Permaculture

through Dominik has the elements of his work and how he positions the term allow us to infer what he means by it.

Permaculture, traditionally, is about designing human systems to mirror the patterns and resilience of natural ecosystems: minimal waste, symbiosis, reuse, local cycles. Jais applies similar thinking to digital or technological systems: what digital culture, hardware, software, and creative practice might look like if we treated digital tools and materials as part of an ecology that we must tend, conserve, reuse, and design sustainably.

In practice, his art demonstrates many features of digital permaculture: using  discarded floppy disks, old hard drives, circuit boards, and more, to make visual art, sculptures and interactive installations that perhaps “only use energy when someone is engaging them” so that resource usage is more responsive and less wasteful.

So digital permaculture, for Jais, seems to be an integrative approach. One where digital/technological materials and systems are treated with the same ethical, ecological awareness given to natural systems. Where art is a form of intervention and commentary; where waste is transformed rather than simply discarded; where interactivity and digital forms are leveraged to reduce environmental harm rather than exacerbate it.

Read more on his website: https://dominikjais.com/

This is a ticketed event of non-members (£6) but FREE for Members!